Contents

Short and plump, she is a rabbit, more specifically a lop-eared rabbit. She has fallen into the habit of being exceedingly slovenly, usually wearing the same clothes for days on end. She is typically seen wearing a short leather skirt, a stained t-shirt with some sort of pun or witticism on it, and a lab coat. She almost always wears calf-high biker boots. Her fur, normally white, is stained heavily in many areas, due to assorted chemical explosions and general accidents. The most prominent is a large purple splotch that covers her face diagonally. This is a permanent stain, though most of the others shift around and fade.

Veronica is unquestionably brilliant, but lacks social grace. She has spent a very large portion of her life cut off from the real world, whether through emotional separation, drugs, or actual physical separation and as such has a difficult time grasping concepts of tact and humility. She tends toward bragging and has an inflated ego that is viciously defended but easily deflated if approached properly. She is squeamish around affection, this also being a very foreign concept to her. Despite this aversion, she is highly over-sexed due to her species.

Intellectually, her talents lie in genetics, nanotechnology, chemistry, biochemistry, and medical technology. She is not a medical doctor, however, and typically views actual ailments as nuisances. At certain times she has been known to use nanites that maintain her physical health and are fueled by alcohol. She has been seen drinking impossible quantities of alcohol, and the only times she has ever appeared intoxicated is when she refused to drink.

Veronica Skerry was a brilliant child, the product of both logical and creative genius parentage. Her father, known throughout the universe as a philanthropist, used his gifts to better mankind. Her mother, an artist specializing in performance pieces, spent much of her free time helping to feed and clothe the needy anywhere she could. She often brought young Veronica along and because of this, she basically defied her mother, looking at her as utterly flawless.

Her father, on the other hand, she grew to slowly despise. Frequently away, he missed many of her assorted childhood events and, in her mind, is responsible for her mother's eventual death. Unable to face the truth, she began constructing a fantasy world for herself that she eventually retreated into, becoming bitter and jaded. In actuality, it was her that ran away, unable to face the prospect of losing her mother. When she fell ill, Veronica took a job teaching chemistry at a university far away from her home. Whenever asked, she insisted that her father abandoned the both of them and was not there for her mother in her final hours.

Teaching at the university, she fell enamored with a teaching aide named Sebastian. She had always been a good, if egotistical, person. She always shied away from any sort of vices. In Sebastian, she saw the archetypal bad boy. The school's main supplier, she rapidly fell into a world of alcohol, drugs, sex, and violence. She had frequent run-ins with the police, but due to her parentage, the school frequently looked the other way. Eventually, a new department head for the science department came in that was not willing to forgive her behavior. Despite urging from the school board, he confronted her and told her that she was not going to get a free ride anymore.

The realization that the school looked at her as a barely tolerable fixture, kept around just for her name, sent her into a spiraling depression. She looked to Sebastian for advice, wanting to better herself. He assured her that he would do everything he could to help her, but in reality, he was furious. He had long since convinced her to create custom tailored drugs for him to sell around university. His greed had to be satisfied, so he started slipping more and more drugs into her food, driving her farther and farther away from reality.

The department head called her to a meeting in his office to inform her of her dismissal and, in a fit of drug-induced rage, she beat him to death with his desk lamp. Unsure what to do, and suddenly without a job, she again turned to Sebastian. He helped her haul the body away to a storage locker that he had purchased anonymously. For several days she stayed in that locker, unsure what to do, pacing back and forth and staring at the corpse. Eventually, she got an idea.

The next time Sebastian came by, the body was gone, and she had a large supply of a new type of drug for him to distribute. Not long after, due to a string of murders around campus, the two of them were forced to leave the planet and strike off somewhere else. During transit, in his anger at having to start his schemes over again, he started beating Veronica.

After years of traveling around the galaxy, amassing great fortune from their exploits, Veronica uses her name to start up a small medical supply company, naming it Skerry Industries. Sebastian sees it as a way to get even richer, while Veronica has only one goal in mind: To become rich and powerful enough to buy out her own father's company, and ruin him.

Their practice of murder having grown far too risky for them to continue themselves, Veronica had long since developed some new tactics. She started recruiting prostitutes to do her dirty work for her. At first, the process was still raw and risky, but eventually she found a way to mold her new employees how she saw fit. She developed a nanotechnology designed for education, and started training her new recruits to be the perfect escorts. Well versed in everything from physics to philosophy, medicine to tantra, eventually people knew to seek out these escorts over any other. While many of them were perfectly safe and legal, doing nothing more than offering companionship to courtesans and dignitaries, there was a group of them that shared Veronica's bitter look at the world, harvesting organs from unsuspecting johns known to be prone towards abuse.

The bodies and harvested organs were not wasted, as now in addition to the drug processing, Veronica was able to treat the organs with her nanotechnology to make them appear as if they were the much more expensive vat-grown organs other companies supplied to the medical community.

Skerry Industries grew to be massive and grew to have a reputation as being dark and sinister, due to their policy of only hiring employees for lifetime contracts, but also as being amazingly generous in both pay and benefits. Many times Veronica and Sebastian clashed over these policies but it always ended in his long-term greed winning out and walking away from the argument.

Eventually he fell for one of the more comely escorts in Veronica's employ and confessed to her what he'd been doing to Veronica for years. What he didn't count on was the loyalty of the employees and she went to Veronica to inform her. In another fit of rage, she came close to killing him, but decided that she wanted better revenge than that. She altered him, twisted him, corrupted him. She cloned him and altered him from the feline that he was into a combination of feline and scorpion, a taur-like body and a lifespan of only two weeks. She programmed the machine to only allow her to activate any of the clones it produced, and only she was able to download his memories into a new clone. Eventually, realizing defeat, he became an unwillingly loyal servant.

For twenty years, Skerry Industries grew larger and larger, eventually becoming hundreds of times larger than her father's business. In her fantasy world, she still didn't see it as big enough to ruin him yet, though. She became more and more corrupt, doing things that could only be described as pure hedonism. In one particularly drug-induced orgy, she had a moment of clarity. She saw all that she was and had done, and, looking at the picture of her mother on her desk, decided to give up. Her self-loathing collapsing her, she decided to give up the company, and retire. She set everything up so that the massive corporation would break into several smaller ones, and turned the business over to a trusted few.

She deactivated the nanites that had kept her alive and healthy through decades of alcohol and drugs, and immediately started to feel ill. While this was just a side effect of her natural immune system finally having work to do again, her fantasies created another situation. She imagined herself as dying. Despite countless blood tests done on herself that amounted to nothing more than some elevated cholesterol levels, she refused to believe it and told the world that she was dying. The reactions were across the board. Most people that knew her as bitter and jaded and cruel applauded her downfall, while the small handful that saw her as more complex than that begged her to get help.

Eventually she accepted her fate and refused any assistance from the numerous offers provided her. She had given up drugs and alcohol and felt as if the haze she'd been living in for years was finally lifting. It was in this moment of clarity that, when walking past a window, her fantasies collapsed. Her world shattered as memories came flooding back. Memories of messages from her father, begging her to come back before it was too late and her mother was gone for good. Headlines of her father creating a memorial and grant program in memory of his wife. Her father's obituary. All the clippings she had collected but never registered in her mind, and she broke down completely.